Here’s a Sure-Fire and Simple Way to Increase Your Post Frequency

Many bloggers struggle with low post frequency. They know they can post more often but for some reason, they don’t get around to posting as much as they should.

For example, some bloggers average one post a week but they feel like they can do better. They think they have time to publish two or three posts a week.

If you want to post more frequently, here’s an easy way to boost your post count. I found this tip from Switch, a great book about making successful changes in your life.

Action Triggers

You may have heard that written goals are accomplished more often than unwritten goals. You can take this technique further. Studies have show that written goals become even more effective if they are related to a time and place. In other words, the more specific your goal, the more likely it will get done. These goals are called action triggers because they remind you to act at specific places and times.

For example, let’s say you have a goal to publish three posts per week. At the beginning of the week, you should write down when and where you will write the posts.
Your notes could look like this:

After work on Tuesday, I will go to my favorite coffee shop and write a blog post.

After work on Thursday, I will go to my favorite coffee shop and write a blog post.

After breakfast on Saturday, I will write a blog post at my home office.

It’s important to write down your goals. If you don’t write them down, you can easily forget about them. Plus, you have to keep reminding yourself about them so you won’t forget. That takes unnecessary mental effort that can be put to better use.

Making your goals more concrete is also key. When you write down a posting appointment with a time and place, you create a trigger in your mind. When the event happens, you’ll remind yourself of what you need to do without spending much effort. In fact, the action trigger will interrupt your normal stream of consciousness. You don’t have to strain your mind to remember your goal.

Finally, action triggers work because you make deliberate decisions beforehand. I think much of our shortcomings when it comes to not achieving our goals is because we don’t really make decisions.

Your desire may be to post more often but do you really decide to do it? Many of us are basically just hoping we’ll get around to blogging more often. But if we write down our goals and make them specific, we create tangible decision points. Instead of hoping, we’re making decisions and taking control of our future.

Over to You

Create an action trigger today and let me know how it works for you.

Also, what strategies do you use to post more regularly?

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Get More Blog Comments

Many bloggers are looking to increase the comments on their blog so I thought I’d share my experiences in this area. Number of comments and comments per post are popular stats to look at because they can show how well your blog is doing in developing conversation and community with readers.

My stats are not that great. I’ve published 173 posts so far on my gaming blog and received 443 comments. This comes out to just a little over 2.5 comments per post. But over my last 15 posts, I’ve been averaging over 8 comments per post. That number has been encouraging since I only have 120 RSS subscribers.

Based on my experience, here are some tips to consider:

Drive more traffic. Unsurprisingly, my high traffic posts tend to have the most comments. With more eyeballs to your posts, you have more chances that some of the visitors will leave a comment. That’s why you’ll find a lot of comments on the top blogs even though some of their posts may not be that deserving of a comment.

Write longer posts. I have a few posts that haven’t received a lot of traffic but they still attract many comments. Most of these posts are longer than the average blog entry. They are at least 1000 words. It makes sense that longer content attracts more blog comments. The more info you have, the more chances your readers have of finding something interesting in the post and responding to it. They may not find the post as a whole very remarkable but a small section in the post could entice them to comment.

Of course, don’t just write more words when a few will do. You don’t want to be like the long-winded college student trying to meet a word requirement for a term paper. Instead, think of a topic you can elaborate on, a topic that will take more than 500 words to explain. Then, explain it as best you can.

Give the conversation time to develop. Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, says you should space your posts at least 3-4 days apart. This gives your audience more time to converse in the comment section since the latest post tends to get more attention than the other posts. At first, Tim tried posting more regularly. However, he felt like the post frequency cut off the conversation of the older post too soon. His readers would stop focusing on the previous post and move on to the newest post. He did a test and sure enough he found that he got more comments per post by publishing them farther apart.

Fortunately, I stumbled on this strategy by accident. I initially wanted to post every weekday or every other weekday. But I realized I was too busy and 1-2 posts per week was the best I could do.

Create unique content. Unique content gets people talking because it jolts them out of their comfort zone and makes them think. But make sure your content is conceptually unique – not just a rewrite of existing stuff your audience already knows. Check out Sugarrae’s classic post, When Unique Content Is Not “Unique”, for more information.

Reply to your comments. If you want to provide a place where people feel free to discuss, you should provide a good example. Respond to your comments especially the ones from your regulars. Make them feel like you value their interaction. Realize that many of them will revisit your blog to see if you will reply. If you don’t, they may stop leaving comments.

Include a call to action. If you want your readers to leave comments, ask for their opinion at the end of the post. Also, tell them they’re free to ask questions and you’ll do your best to answer them.

Over to You

How do encourage comments on your blog?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Long-Term Vision Should Trump Reader Feedback

In July 2009, a new blogger entered the same gaming niche as my blog. His blog looked like it had a lot of potential. He posted daily including several 1500+ word posts. He was very active on Twitter. He wrote several guest posts. He scored an interview on a popular blogging blog. With these efforts, he quickly made an impact in the industry and his traffic and Twitter followers grew quickly.

You could tell that he spent a lot of time building his blog and it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before he became a top five blogger in the niche. However, his initial enthusiasm only lasted three months. After that time, he started posting less and less and in December, he made his last post – one short of the 100 post milestone.

What happened? How did the promising blogger end up in the wasteland of abandoned blogs?

Too Much Feedback is a Bad Thing

One thing I noticed was his obsession for feedback. He was always asking his blog readers and Twitter followers for topics to write about. Also, he used polls all the time to determine the topics of his posts.

He had a diverse audience who wanted to talk about many different topics. He didn’t filter his feedback and wrote about all the different topics. As such, his blog became very unfocused. I stopped reading it because I never knew what to expect.

He catered to his whole audience but his traffic plateaued once people realized that he was going to serve everybody. Without a strong focus, people liked his blog but no one really loved it. And ironically, less and less people responded to his requests for feedback.

What’s Your Long-Term Vision?

I think it’s important to have a long-term vision for your blog that trumps reader feedback. You shouldn’t give up too much control to your audience. You are the expert.

Apple didn’t ask their customers for feedback on the iPhone. If anything, they probably would’ve requested too many features and made the iPhone just like the other smartphones. The iPhone works because it has less features which makes it easier to use than its competitors. This was the vision of Apple and they weren’t going to let feedback change their course.

Consider the creators of popular TV shows. I bet their shows would be much worse if they implemented audience feedback on a regular basis. Before the actors were even hired, they had a vision for their show and they knew that straying from that vision would hurt their show.

Therefore, have a concrete vision for your blog. The blogger I first mentioned didn’t have one and it cost him.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t listen to feedback. Feedback can be useful. Just don’t let it trump your long-term vision.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Book Review of Rework, a New Bestselling Business Book

Rework is the new business book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the executive team of 37signals.

I’m a big fan of their blog and Backpack, one of their products, so when I found out they were releasing a business book, I had to check it out.

The release date was yesterday so I went to my local Barnes & Noble, found the book, and read the whole thing there in two hours. Yes, the book is short compared to other business books but I liked it so much that I bought it for reference sake.

Even though the book is not a book about blogging, I think the book has many great tips for probloggers.

Basically, it’s a manifesto for doing work differently. Written from their experience, Jason and David blow up many of the workplace norms you find today in most companies, big and small. For example, here’s a look at some of their chapter titles: Learning from mistakes is overrated, Planning is guessing, Meetings are toxic, and Underdo your competition. Also, they claim that workaholism is a bad idea.

As you can tell, Rework is not the typical business book that reminds people of boring college classes and stuffy professors.

Jason and David have figured out how to run a wildly successful business in the new media, internet-based world we live in without the negative aspects that people normally think of like long hours, ineffective bureaucracy, and cutthroat tactics. Their company, 37signals, has only 16 employees. But even though the company is not big, they have a big impact with over 3 million people using their products.

The employees are very autonomous. They can work at their own schedule and can choose to work at home. In fact, half of their employees don’t even live in the same city as the company office.

Here’s a telling quote from Jason in Inc. Magazine:

Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.

Therefore, I think Jason and David’s experience of running a business is great for the average problogger. You don’t need the typical business book that caters to offline businesses and big corporations.

Also, 37signals understands the power of blogging. As a small business, they don’t have a sales team or a marketing department. In fact, most of their business comes from their blog. That’s how I found out about them. Their blog, Signal vs. Noise, is very popular with over 100k RSS subscribers.

The book can help you get into the business mindset, which is the mindset you need to be in to really make money – not the blogging mindset.  A blog is a great marketing channel but you need a strong business as a foundation to have the best chance of quitting your day job.

There will be sections in the book that may not apply to your situation right now. For example, it has some essays about hiring employees but most bloggers I know are not in a position to hire. Still, the other sections are well worth the price of the book and who knows, in the future, you may want to hire employees or freelancers for your blog.

Learn more about Rework.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Why eBay Partner Network Makes 22 Times More Money Than AdSense On My Blog

Updated on March 5, 2009: I noticed a huge discrepancy with my Google Analytics pageviews versus the impressions being reported by eBay Partner Network.

Needless to say that changed my calculations. I reworked the numbers and found that instead of 200% in the original post, eBay makes me 22 times more money than AdSense! Or in percentage terms, 2,100%. Of course, with this new knowledge, I’m very motivated to put eBay links on all my relevant posts, not just my most popular ones

I’ve been pretty excited the last couple days. I finally found an income stream for my gaming blog that actually makes a decent amount of money without hurting the usability of my readers.

At first, I tried AdSense but the ads I got were very irrelevant. My gaming blog is about a collectible card game called Magic The Gathering. As a card game, the word deck is huge keyword. However, that word was a problem since it would show ads about building a physical deck for your house. Also, since the title of the game has the word magic, I would get ads about magic tricks and how to cast actual spells.

I estimate that 70-80% of my ads were irrelevant. As such, I knew my readers were having a poor reading experience on my blog. I even hated looking at my site. The big intrusive irrelevant ads were a turnoff. I tried smaller ads but my income sunk too much. But even with the big ads, my income was not very good. Relevance is huge if you want to make money and very few people were clicking my ads.

My sister has a dating blog that gets less than half the traffic as my blog. But she has earned more with AdSense since her blog shows more relevant ads. After a while, I couldn’t optimize AdSense to make more money. My income was so low that I decided to drop the program and look for other ways to make money.

I tried affiliate programs from online retail stores but I couldn’t find a quality program. Surprisingly there was no info product I was comfortable with endorsing that had an affiliate program. I was close to giving up. I thought I would have to focus solely on creating my own products to make decent money from my blog. I’m working on my own info product but it will take a couple months to complete. I wanted to make some money right away without resorting to AdSense.

To add to my frustration, my blog was reaching new traffic highs every month for the last couple of months. I had recently reached the 1,000 daily visitors milestone.

eBay Partner Network

As a last ditch effort, I turned to eBay’s cost per click (CPC) program called eBay Partner Network (ePN). I knew they could be a great income source, since they have a lot of traffic and there is an active eBay market for the cards I blog about.

I sent my application but immediately regreted it when I read this article about how to get accepted in the network. Yeah, I know. I should’ve read the article first! My excitement and impatience got the best of me when I found out that eBay had a CPC program.

In my application, I wrote a 50 word blurb about my site. I didn’t put any effort in explaining why my site was a good fit for eBay. Needless to say, my site was rejected after a couple of weeks.

I then wrote them a 380 word email message asking them to reconsider my site. I explained my business plan and gave multiple traffic stats. I even included my experience as a search specialist and blogger. I knew my site was a good one for eBay so on the second try, I spent the extra effort to communicate that fact.

I couple days later I was accepted into the program.

I immediately create a couple eBay links and placed them on my most popular pages.

After a couple of days, I looked at the numbers and was very happy to discover that eBay made 22 times more money than my previous AdSense numbers (based on CPM, or cost per thousand page impressions)

Plus, the best performing AdSense ads are the big square ads that take up a lot of space and make your blog look cluttered. On the other hand, eBay has text links that can be placed in the middle of your posts. Therefore, you add value and an income stream without making your blog look cluttered with ads.

My blog doesn’t have any ads right now and it’s a great feeling. I do plan to sell ads on my sidebar in the future but I’m glad I don’t have to put ads in the content section of my blog. That section is the best place to put ads if you want to make money but it’s the worst spot from the user’s perspective.

I’m excited about the future with ePN. I haven’t done any testing on my eBay links so I think there’s room to optimize and earn more money.

If you have a product driven site, I definitely recommend eBay Partner Network.

Performancing offers blog management services.